The forthcoming article “Rethinking the imperative mandate: Toward a better balance between independence and accountability” by Pierre-Étienne Vandamme is summarized by the author below.
The imperative mandate is an old practice meant to increase citizens’ control over their political representatives. It does so by allowing citizens to give binding instructions to their representatives (or “delegates”) and to recall them in case of betrayal of these instructions. This practice has been defended historically by figures such as Rousseau and Marx. However, one salient characteristic of the representative governments that have emerged since the end of the 18th Century is that they do not authorize (and sometimes explicitly forbid) this practice, elevating the independence of elected representatives as one of their foundational principles.
In this article, I review the reasons why a strictly imperative mandate, entirely binding representatives, is unappealing in a mass democracy. In short, a degree of independence from voters is valuable to allow representatives to make decisions on unanticipated events, to change their minds based on new information, to deliberate, negotiate and co-construct laws, integrating legitimate minority claims. However, representatives should also be strongly accountable to voters. If they are too independent, it becomes too easy for them to betray their promises, make self-serving decisions or be captured by private interest lobbies.
To achieve a better balance between independence and accountability than prevailing forms of representation, I defend an alternative proposal called the Semi-Directed Mandate. It consists in 1) asking candidates or parties to put forward key priorities (in addition to their broader program) before the election; 2) allowing voters to give a more specific mandate to their representatives by approving or rejecting these key priorities on the ballot, and 3) allowing citizens to revoke the mandate and call anticipated elections in case of betrayal of key promises, unless the targeted representatives can offer convincing justifications for departing from their mandate.
This would empower citizens vis-à-vis their representatives without entirely suppressing the latter’s independence. It also allows for constant dialogue between representatives and citizens incentivizing politicians to spend more time publicly justifying their actions and decisions. Additionally, as a by-product, it may improve voters’ average degree of information by attracting voters’ attention to parties’ key proposals, thereby making the vote more program-based and easing retrospective judgments.
All of this makes the Semi-Directed Mandate potentially more appealing than the traditional imperative mandate. It is also an improvement on existing forms of recall, as practiced in several US states and many other countries, which usually lack specificity regarding the valid reasons for recalling an elected representative.
Nevertheless, these theoretical expectations must be taken with caution since this proposal has not so far been tested empirically. One important point of attention is the risk of instrumentalization by opposition parties, as often happens with existing recall mechanisms. There are reasons to believe that the limitation of the possibility of recall to cases of betrayal of key promises makes the use of recall less attractive to opposition parties, as it may push the party in power to deliver on this key promise, which the opposition is unlikely to endorse. This, however, will need to be observed in practice.
About the Author: Pierre-Étienne Vandamme is an FWO Senior Postdoctoral Researcher in political philosophy at KU Leuven (Belgium). Their research “Rethinking the imperative mandate: Toward a better balance between independence and accountability” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.